Posted
by
Soulskillon Saturday April 24, 2010 @09:28AM
from the privacy-is-a-crutch dept.

mjn writes "In yet another backtrack from their privacy policy, Facebook has decided to retroactively move more information into the public, indexable part of profiles. The new profile parts made public are: a list of things users have become 'fans' of (now renamed to 'likes'), their education and work histories, and what they list under 'interests.' Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users, despite the fact that some of this information was entered by users at a time when Facebook's privacy policy explicitly promised that it wouldn't be part of the public profile."

How long until identity thieves, 419 scammers & spammers create software that cantrawl sites like facebook for useful info?

Seriously, what are they going to find that will be so useful? "Hello, sir -- I note that you went to the University of Nebraska and worked for a while at Cargill. Because of this, I am interested in repatriating my family's fortune to your bank account, for which you will get a fee." Get real...

The realistic threat of facebook vis a vis privacy is that of your youthful indiscretions being on wide display for coworkers and bosses to see.

I doubt 419 scammers also... Employers maybe... Goverment, yes? The fact that I'm on a number of fanlists that would probably have me labled a radical conservative is not something I want available on my facebook page. (Even if people know by my posts and who know me, etc..) So I went into the profile options and figured I'd "customize" it. Well I changed it to "only me" option and logged out,etc. they still show up. So now the goverment can deploy a robot to crawl facebook and build a map of your "like" links and probably come up with a good profile of you opinion/politics.

"We must all hang together, or we will surely hang separately." - Benjamin Franklin. They proudly scrawled their names across that document. Sometimes it's more important to stand-up for what is right, than to be anonymous.

BTW I prefer the word "liberal". I want people to have the right to carry guns for self-defense, to marry whomever they please, worship whatever deity they desire, eliminate income tax for everyone below $100,000 (as was the case in the 1920s), and amend the consti

Adjusting for inflation (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001519.html) that would be no income tax for everyone below $1,067,821.78 in 2008 dollars.
This is what is wrong with society - it is not a partisan or even a US problem. It is an honor problem.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11706 [cato.org]
Maybe we just don't need all the governments we have around the world, we just need people to have honor and uphold justice.

Maybe we just don't need all the governments we have around the world, we just need people to have honor and uphold justice.

Really? The solution is that easy? If we just have honor and uphold justice our problems will all be solved? Too bad nobody thought of that sooner!

Seriously though, lets give people more credit they deserve and say that 99.9% of people on earth are on board with being honorable. That still leaves 67,000,000 people out there who won't be honorable. Then, you have to deal with the varying opinions on what is honorable and what is upholding justice. Honor and Justice aren't really singular things. There

The enemies of freedom in our country use the words "liberal" and "conservative" to lump people who are truly trying to effect positive change together with the various groups of screaming man-children depicted with those monikers on television. So since I believe that government should not interfere in people's lives except when fundamental rights are violated, I get lumped together with the Glenn Beckbeast with the word "conservative." I disagree with him and others like him on many points, mostly that there are no outrageous conspiracies to deny people rights.

Words like liberal and conservative are being twisted to deny people the ability to think rationally. In that sense there is a conspiracy and everyone who uses those words is part of it.

The value of gold is that it is relatively rare, cannot be manufactured, and is finite. A gold standard isn't about gold being inherently valuable - it's about governments being able to issue more wealth than they have available to back it.

This is why 'wealth' isn't (or shouldn't be) measured in anything so abstract as 'money' but in actual indexes of commodities and societies.

How many children are born and not dying in infancy? That's wealth.How many people are educated? That's wealth.How well maintained is your infrastructure? That's wealth.How healthy is your population? That's wealth.How many crops do you have? That's wealth.How resilient is your ecosystem? That's wealth.How many murders aren't happening in your cities? That's wealth.

It's a lot more than employers and coworkers. Insurance companies could see if you hang out with people who are into dangerous sports, drink too much or are otherwise exposed to increased risks. Banks could draw conclusions about your credit worthiness by looking at the credit history of your friends. Merchants could see what your friends like or bought and at what price. Then they can avoid lowballing an offer to you (i.e. get you to pay the most you're willing to pay). The social graph is powerful economi

The realistic threat of facebook vis a vis privacy is that of your youthful indiscretions being on wide display for coworkers and bosses to see.

See also: Craigslist Killer. They keep making more and more information public. Profile pics earlier, and now likes of local restaurants/bars/clubs. Mix with the forced usage of real names, and you've got a perfect $&@^-storm.

No, you missed the point (that better not become a meme). If "Elementary Elementary" is NOT used as an answer to the security question "Which elementary school you went to?", its irrelevant that someone finds out which elementary school you went to.

The point is you give fake random answers to the security questions, so if someone finds out the real answers, they still can't get past them.

The "real danger" isn't youthful indiscretion. It's profiling in a giant model by Government AND commercial interests in ways that will forever affect your ability to get a job, find insurance or even your ability to freely travel.

How do you build a panopticon, a prison for a society in which real power lies outside of government, in the hands of private commercial and financial interests? Honeypots. Google and Facebook and whatnot. Everyone is so anti-Government, like the stupid Reaganites. That's like being against a small-town cop. He's got the gun, alright - but he works for the man in the big house, at the edge of town. Hired. The enemy isn't Barney Fife - It's Old Man Potter.

How does this relate to Facebook?

You present a real, but minor threat, versus the real evil Facebook represent - along with the darkest nightmare of Google.

Remember, Watson, at IBM supplied tabulation equipment for improving the German Census in the 1930's. Technology was welcomed, and was going to modernize, to improve every German life. Except for a minority or two, of 11 million...

Cypher: "All I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead."

Facebook has been gradually boosting its profile in Washington D.C. [venturebeat.com] over the past year and is on the hunt for a second senior lobbyist to add to its office of four. Disclosures released a few days ago show that, on top of lobbying the usual suspects Internet companies reach out to like the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. senators and representatives, the fast-growing social network has also been busy deepening ties to government intelligence and homeland security agencies....What's interesting about Facebook's lobbying in D.C. is what it spends money on despite its small size. It was the only consumer Internet company out of Google, Amazon, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple to reach out to intelligence agencies last year, according to lobbying disclosure forms. It has lobbied the Office of the Director of National Intelligence -- an umbrella office founded in the wake of Sept. 11 that synthesizes intelligence from 17 agencies including the CIA and advises the President -- for the last three quarters on privacy and federal cyber-security policy. It has reached out to the Defense Intelligence Agency too.

As many as 163 variables, mostly drawn from the U.S. Census, come into play for each synthetic American. Called EpiSimdemics, the model almost perfectly matches the demographic attributes of groups with at least 1500 people, according to Keith Bisset, a senior research associate who works on the simulation's software. The software generates fake people to populate real communities and assigns each person characteristics such as age, education level, and occupation to mirror local statistics derived from the most recent national census. In accordance with the data, some individuals are clustered into families, while others live alone.

Every synthetic household is assigned a real street address, based on land-use information from Navteq, a digital-mapping company. Using data from a business directory, each employed individual is matched to a specific job within a reasonable commute from the person's home. Similarly, actual schools, supermarkets, and shopping centers identified through Navteq's database are also linked to households based on their proximity to the home. When an artificial American goes grocery shopping, the simulation algorithm assigns probabilities that

Just as I saw GFP and was so aghast that someone who more than likely is a/. regular could even be so naive, I started figuring out how to refute him/her. Thanks for doing such a good job for me. I, being former military, and having plenty of contacts in DIA, State Department, Interpol and other intel agencies have been the guy crying wolf to my family and friends about facebook. Who really doesn't think that something so popular (usage of facebook surpassed usage of google recently) is going to get jumped

There are two bits here, relevant to the "Super Simulation" being built by NSA - and the role of ordinary Internet activity and Social Networks in functioning as data-sources:

In November of 2007, Keith Olbermann interviewed Mark Klein on MSNBC, where Klein elaborated on the secret program, saying that virtually all internet traffic in the entire country was handed over to the NSA. He appeared on MSNBC at a time when Congress was debating whether or not to grant the telecom companies legal immunity for participating in the NSA program, which would thus shut down all pending legal action being taken against the companies for their involvement in the illegal program. Klein reflected on his job, saying that, "Here I am, being forced to connect the Big Brother machine."

and:

In September of 2003, Congress ended funding for the program. The media then hailed the TIA program as "dead and gone." Yet, the funding was cut for the specific program as envisaged under the umbrella of TIA. The various programs within TIA could continue as separate projects, with the full funding and support of Congress....In 2006, it was revealed that TIA stopped "in name only" and in fact does live on, and it "was moved from the Pentagon's research-and-development agency to another group, which builds technologies primarily for the National Security Agency." Interestingly, "Two of the most important components of the TIA program were moved to the Advanced Research and Development Activity, housed at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md." The program has heavy involvement from private defense and intelligence contractors, highly secretive corporations that get major contracts from US intelligence agencies to be able to undertake intelligence activities that aren't subjected to Congressional oversight.

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.-- Konrad Adenauer

So even one posts a very basic user profile, such as the one you suggested, one's privacy is not safe. An interested party could fill in much of the blanks by tracking the interaction with others, including apps.

Even Facebook book users with strict privacy settings are still at risk, if they don't literally screen every "friend" they have to ensure they are legit (ie. not a stranger sneaking in as a "rogue" friend) and that will they respect their privacy, as well as, all "friends of friends" (equals the whole world, practically; six degrees of separation comes to mind, so good luck with that).

Facebook's business growth primarily comes from eroding user privacy to gather ever more specific, *personal data of each individual user* for marketing purposes, as well as, to grow its user base - more user profiles open to the public equates to more user interaction (ie. "friending", messaging, gaming, etc), and hence more traffic.

Martin Prince [wikipedia.org] is a trusted, if not regularly abused, alpha-geek who just might be trying to send you something important. That's why.

Oh I get it -- in this scenario, I am stupid. Got it, thanks...

I don't think he was implying that it was limited to this scenario... but that's just my take on ACtard's post. But just because you aren't stupid enough to open an 'exe' attachment from anyone doesn't mean most people who test negative for/. are smart enough to not open it.

I think many of us of/. take offense when a comment implies that we as individuals are apt to do s

I get these all the time from muppet friend who have had their password stolen, but it is definitely easy to tell...

And who tells you that it will not get better? An advanced spamming software might determine common interest between and the person from whom the mail claims to come (now easy, with all the data public on facebook), match them against a database of plausible content, maybe even automatically analyze (in a rudimentary way) the writing style on his facebook profile, and then use that information

Anyone who ever had even a passing interest in personal data security and privacy has left Facebook months ago (or, like me, never considered it a great idea to put your life online for public review). Everyone left will probably think it's a great feature.

Actually, there is another category: the uninformed. A lot of people really do not keep up with the latest decisions Facebook is making with regard to personal privacy, or are even aware that Facebook can, at any time, reveal their data. I am referring, of course, to the same sort of people who are not sure what a web browser is or which browser they are using -- which appears to be the overwhelming majority.

No, Facebook cannot at any time reveal whatever they want - there are such things as laws, when Facebook decided to start doing business outside the US they accepted they had to operate under foreign laws - last time they did something like this they got hit by the Danish data proectection agency, and trust me, once they got a sniff of this this will be removed (at least for Danes).

It looks like Facebook is trying to back into a Buzz style privacy uproar one step at a time. I wonder if a slow erosion of privacy will be swallowed easier than Google's 'Buzz gulp' of all-at-once exposure?

Undoubtedly, it will be more successful. I think people suffer from mass amnesia -- nobody seems to remember that they used to be careful about giving out their real name on the Internet. Few will notice that the latest erosion of privacy is actually built on dozens of other incidents.

Not everyone... and even if I wanted to use web-based email, I wouldn't use a freemail-based one. There's no reason you can't self-host. Pool resources with family and friends, get your own domain, and host your own. It'll cost you what, 25 cents a month each? Isn't being ad-free worth that much?

Welcome to the new Facebook, the real time, always up to date, police forensics / NSA database : ) Saves them the trouble of gathering it all anyway. These new changes seem to benefit big brother more than anyone else. I can't really see any worthwhile benefit to the end user or advertisers.

Prodding them for it is official and leaves a paper trail outside the organisation. Public information, in contrast, can be crawled and added to private databases without the need for pesky things like warrants or even official requests.

There's such a thing as only giving facebook the information you don't mind being public. I don't give much of a crap who knows who my friends are but at the same time I'm not posting credit card details in my status updates.

Facebook is like a friend that can't keep his mouth shut. Don't tell him EVERYTHING

Wrong. Don't tell him ANYTHING. Facebook, MySpace and all the other "social networking" crap is utterly useless, except for those people trolling through the data (advertisers, identity thieves, etc). You would be surprised how just a tiny bit of seemly unimportant information can be added together with hundreds of bits of other seemingly unimportant information to reveal a whole lot more than you want to be revealed.

It's not useless. It's a damn good way to keep in touch with friends all over the planet.

Yes, I know personal web pages, email and (god forbid) the phone is still there, but it turns out the status updates in fb keep just the right amount of info flowing to keep people like me interested.

Email and other forms of contact often get stale, you stop writing, you stop calling after a few months of not seeing each other. FB keeps a minimal level of contact going, and it keeps people together.

I'm prepared to have some of my data mined for that convenience. I doubt very much that identity theives could get very far with what's on there.

You don't have to. There is an option in the privacy settings to turn off your publicly indexable profile. You can still be on Facebook, share info with people you want to, and just disable the ability of search engines and data miners to pull information out of a publicly available profile.

I just enabled this option today now that FB has decided to put information into public profiles that, while not "secret" by any means, isn't stuff I want to encourage every data miner in the world to index about me.

There is an option in the privacy settings to turn off your publicly indexable profile. You can still be on Facebook, share info with people you want to, and just disable the ability of search engines and data miners to pull information out of a publicly available profile.

That just stops your profile from showing up in search results. All of the publicly-available parts of your profile - name, location, pages, gender, friends list, etc - are still avaiable to every application that any friend of yours uses, and now also to approved third-party websites that they visit too. There's no way to turn this off.

Except that there is no way to insure that this data doesn't go to the government. They buy a lot of data on citizens from private companies and knowing friendship networks actually is quite valuable information for Big Brother. Take a look at how Pakistan is fighting the Taliban there, it has a lot to do with knowing family networks. As someone with hippy friends, I don't want to be investigated if they join Sea Shepherd.

I take it that the buying of citizens' personal data from privately held corporations is yet another thing they excuse by citing the Commerce Clause? Otherwise I'm having a hard time finding where the Constitution authorizes them to do anything like this.

They can't buy them from third parties (i.e. facebook) but there's nothing to say they can't buy it from fourth parties, which is what they do. Company A that sells user data to Company B which is then utterly free to sell it to the government.

My point was not how many proxies or middlemen they must go through. My point was, where in the Constitution does it say they can buy personal data about anyone? Where in the enumerated powers given to the Federal Government is there such a statement?

That's why I am guessing it must be an interpretation of the Commerce Clause. That's a nice catch-all that basically lets them do whatever they want so long as a friendly judge will sign off on it.

I'm amused by the constant uproars people make every time facebook changes something. what the hell do they think the whole point of facebook is? that they are just providing this service for free? this is a classic case of people wanting their cake and eating it too.

meanwhile, government already has complete access to everyone's communication. you don't hear nearly so much about that anymore. I'm a lot more worried about law enforcement abuse than marketing products I might actually want at some point.

I'm amused by the constant uproars people make every time facebook changes something. what the hell do they think the whole point of facebook is? that they are just providing this service for free? this is a classic case of people wanting their cake and eating it too.

meanwhile, government already has complete access to everyone's communication. you don't hear nearly so much about that anymore. I'm a lot more worried about law enforcement abuse than marketing products I might actually want at some point.

In this case, particular bits of data were disclosed to Facebook with the written understanding that they would remain private. That was according to Facebook's own privacy policy. Later, Facebook reneged on this understanding and unilaterally decided to made them retroactively public. They did this without giving anyone a chance to opt-out and there was no period of notice (between announcing this and actually doing it) to give users a chance to remove or edit that data. This is your classic bait-and-switch. They said one thing, got people to accept what they said on good faith, and then they did another thing.

I understand that Facebook wants to make money. Every for-profit corporation wants to make money. However, that doesn't give them the right to use deception and that's what happened here. Reputable companies manage to make profit without making promises they refuse to keep to their users or customers. What Facebook did is like moving the goalposts or changing the rules while the game is being played. Can you understand now why saying "did you think they were providing you a free service" is a strawman and fails to address the actual issue here?

I used to think like that, but the worst thing about facebook privacy is not what you disclose about yourself (which after all is what you choose to disclose and nothing more), but what others publish about you.
Here is some news for you: even if you don't have an account, you are probably already on facebook. Unless you live in a cave or avoid social life at all costs, chances are someone already uploaded a picture with you. It's preferable to have an account so you'll usually (though not always...) get to see those photos, comment on them, etc. That's the only reason why I signed up in the first place.

Anyone who ever had even a passing interest in personal data security and privacy has left Facebook months ago

Stop making retarded generalizations. I have a passing interest in personal data security and privacy, but I don't post stuff to Facebook that it would be harmful to have known by the public, except where it's already a part of the public record. From my former writings and whatnot, largely accessible through google and the internet archive, you can tell what my full name is, my hometown, my high school. Why should I try to make these things private at this late date? I don't announce that I'm leaving my ho

The 5% of the world who live in the USSRA have forgotten what it was like back in the good old days of the former USA.

Your life is already online for public review by anyone with letterhead, a fax machine, a business license, and a few bucks a month for access to ostensibly public-but-controlled databases like MERLIN.

Not in countries that don't allow such things. We don't all live in the USSRA. Some of us live in countries that have laws prohibiting the government giving out your drivers license info or

Unfortunately, for a member of Gen Y, it is not a question of an interest in personal privacy. Facebook has become a legitimate part of our social identity. A great deal of communication and social interaction goes on through Facebook. While I agree that the changes to Facebook are horrendous, deleting my profile is simply not an option if I want to continue to have a full social life - for example, many events/parties/gatherings/whatever are coordinated solely through Facebook, and off the top of my head I cannot think of a single friend of mine that does not have a profile. Not having a profile at this stage would be akin to an 18th-century Frenchman deciding not to go to salons because he thought they were lame. It is simply not an option unless I want to become a pariah.

Of course, the trouble is that Facebook knows how important it has become, and now can essentially do whatever it wants knowing that very few people will ever leave due to the reasons I expressed above.

The opt-in / out notice I saw was for integrating with other sites and having "likes" or something appear on those other sites. To me, it wasn't immediately clear exactly what they meant (I didn't bother to study it, I just opted out). It doesn't sound like exactly this same thing though. For some time I had given Facebook certain pieces of real information and setup groups (lists) to set the security so that, for instance, "immediate family" and "indirect family" could see my cell number and address while

I'm also Canadian but did not see an opt-in/out notice. I went to check my public profile and discovered that it was indeed showing my "likes" amongst other things whereas my previous privacy settings explicitly forbade that kind of info being available to non-friends. I've since turned off my public profile altogether and you now get a 404-type page instead. This might be a good compromise if you don't mind people not being able to add you as easily (something I definitely don't mind).

Confirm the Pages that will be on your profile
Uncheck any Page you don't want to link to. Linking to education and work Pages may also create additional Pages, such as for your major or job title. If you don't link to any Pages, these sections on your profile will be empty. By linking your profile to Pages, you will be making these connections public. [emphasis mine]

You are about to remove this information
If you don't link to any Pages, the following sections on your profile will be empty:

Why be on Facebook at all? They don't run it for warm fuzzy feelings. The bulk of the $$$$ is contained in its user data so they'll tap that well more and more as time goes on, not less.

I'm not necessarily worried about privacy from Facebook or their corporate partners; I'm much more worried about what stalker girls would learn about me in the newly public information (and what's made public next, contact info, address, messages, chat logs?). Girls who stalk geeks are *crazy*

Is there something like Facebook but which doesn't suck so much? It shouldn't be impossible to have something which users like, and which the owners can make a profit from. Actually, I don't even care about the profit part. Seems like something Google would be interested in. I guess they have Orkut, but that never really went anywhere. Perhaps Wave?

I have had an Orkut page for quite some time (since way before Google got them), but never used it.

Out of curiosity, I went back to take a look. I kind of like what they've done. The page is really pretty lightweight, particularly in comparison with Facebook.

I wonder why Google's not promoting the service. It could be a worthy competitor to Facebook. After all, pretty much everybody I know, tech or not, has a gmail account that could easily be associated with Orkut.

Not really. In my opinion, most of facebook's power comes not from the platform, but the fact that so many people use it. Regardless of how good the platform is, if only 50,000 people use it, you're not going to get as much out of it because your friends are all on facebook because their friends are all on facebook.

The Google empire seems to cover quite a lot of what Facebook offers. You can have your personal website on Google, link to those of your friends, you can see on Gmail if any of your contacts are online and start up an IM conversation with them, etc.

Google Buzz seems to be aimed at Facebook status updates. Wave is more of a collaboration platform. But to get a critical mass to move across, you'd have to move all the pointless timewasting data collect^H^H^H^H^H games there too, so it would fairly quickly end up as bad as facebook.

If I delete my account, I miss out on invitations to do stuff. For many of my friends, Facebook is now the ONLY way they communicate. As much as I dislike these latest policy changes, I think you can still use Facebook 'safely'. For instance, there's no information about me on my profile at all - not even gender. I haven't allowed any apps. I haven't uploaded any photos. I don't 'like' any pages. I delete all Facebook's cookies as soon as I log out. I've unchecked all the boxes and opted out of everything t

I use Facebook simply to keep in touch with friends, receive invites, etc. So my profile has some information about me:

1. I 'like' a couple of bands that I like to keep up with

2. I 'like' college football

3. I 'like' some tech companies that I do business with

4. I have a Computer Science degree

5. I live in Atlanta, GA

What's the big deal? This is all information I would share with a random stranger sitting at a bar in an airport. I do use the strictest 'privacy' settings, but that is just to put a little more control over companies using my information for their monetary gain - not because I'm terrified of people finding out about it (why would I put it online if I were?). I don't join groups or post comments regarding politics or anything else one might consider sensitive, but if used correctly, Facebook can be harmless.

I guess what I wrote didn't come off right. I am not questioning your intelligence. You do that yourself. I meant to write "Think. [Ask yourself,] are you being intelligent if you still use Facebook after all this?"

I have to be amused that the first two lines of the page for me currently read:

Become a fan of Slashdot on FacebookYour Rights Online: Facebook Retroactively Makes More User Data Public

I suppose that since Slashdot is on the internet, and nothing on the internet is private, I shouldn't mind anyone knowing, right?Girls, where are you going? Oh, come back, it's not that bad, really! I just do it for the karma!

People need to understand once something hits the internet its out there, no privacy promise by a huge corporation (that probably owns the data once it hits its servers and gave it self the right to change policy whenever they want in the wall of text) is going to protect it.

The Cloud sound nice and all but the hype often forgets (intentionally ?) to make the dumb user aware of the consequences and dangers of putting something in a hard drive they cannot control

People need to understand once something hits the internet its out there, no privacy promise by a huge corporation (that probably owns the data once it hits its servers and gave it self the right to change policy whenever they want in the wall of text) is going to protect it.

The problem is that usually the spread of info on the net outside of the usual corporate channels is done by human actors (viral videos, internet rumors), not by corporate actors. In this case, Facebook is randomly destroying their users' privacy for seemingly no reason. The corporate partners already had access, but now FB is giving everyone in the world access.

Long before the Internet became a household word, the accepted bit of "sage wisdom" was this:

Never say on the Internet what you wouldn't want shouted from mountaintops.

And never before has this been true. There is almost nothing on my Facebook profile I wouldn't mind being shouted from mountaintops. And for those few things I might care about are things I wouldn't want my Ex knowing about. But she hardly lacks the sophistication to discover these things.:-)

addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops.

More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that imapacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have

addendum: never allow a friend to say anything on facebook you wouldn't want shouted from the mountaintops.
More seriously, I think there is a different kind of privacy concern that comes from mass data-mining... it's not the "will I be scammed/blackmailed" but more of a "will I be blacklisted". Will potential employers, governments or other organizations begin to define a sort of "social credit score" that impacts my career, the rate at which I am "randomly" picked out for an audit, etc. I don't have any secrets worth hiding, but I have a terrible fear of "death by random red tape".

This is already going on. I've already had one place mention my postings on an online forum when I went in for the interview. They claimed not to take it against me, but I never got the job.

Its possible the retroactive parts of these changes are in breach of UK/EU data protection laws. The issue is that a holder of personal data may only use information for the purposes for which it was provided. If the person supplying the data wished to keep it relatively private and Facebook then later make it public without the informed prior consent of the user then there is a probable breach of the regulations.

Of course Facebook will say that they are not based in the EU but they probably do have servers and interests there and gain revenue from EU based advertisers.

Why is this so difficult? Repeat after me "I will not post anything to the Internet that I do not want the whole world to know". And also "I will not trust a third party company to keep my data private ever even if they pinky swear to it". Then if you don't post things you do not want revealed then when the company (facebook in this case) makes the data public or gets hacked then nothing of value will be lost.

I also don't understand people who have facebook pages set all to private. What is the point of that. If you want to send information to a small group of people then set up a mailing list. Why you would use facebook for that purpose is completely beyond me. Instead tap into the fantastic intrinsic value that facebook has in building a brand identity and value for YOUR name. Post things that will make future employers, future lovers and your parents proud. Then you'll have nothing to hide because what you want hidden you never posted in the first place.

You literally have to be an Internet Olympic hero to delete or remove your Facebook account after these changes. But I found this story/guide, by Mathew Ingram very useful when I removed my facebook presence.

For all of you that keep saying "I don't post private information on the intarwebs, so I'm safe" you are missing the point.
Facebook is just the leading example but ther has been a fundamental shift in the way the Internet is being used since the 90's.

Eben Moglen:

We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage - machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series of rules which allowed disparate, heterogeneous networks to be networked together around the assumption that everybody's equal.
In the Web the social harm done by the client-server model arises from the fact that logs of Web servers become the trails left by all of the activities of human beings, and the logs can be centralised in servers under hierarchical control. Web logs become power. With the exception of search, which is a service that nobody knows how to decentralise efficiently, most of these services do not actually rely upon a hierarchical model. They really rely upon the Web - that is, the non-hierarchical peerage model created by Tim Berners-Lee, and which is now the dominant data structure in our world.
The services are centralised for commercial purposes. The power that the Web log holds is monetisable, because it provides a form of surveillance which is attractive to both commercial and governmental social control. So the Web, with services equipped in a basically client-server architecture, becomes a device for surveillance as well as providing additional services. And surveillance becomes the hidden service wrapped inside everything we get for free.
The cloud is a vernacular name which we give to a significant improvement in the server-side of the web - the server, decentralised. It becomes, instead of a lump of iron, a digital appliance, which can be running anywhere. This means that for all practical purposes servers cease to be subject to significant legal control. They no longer operate in a policy-directed manner, because they are no longer iron, subject to territorial orientation of law. In a world of virtualised service provision, the server which provides the service, and therefore the log which is the result of the hidden service of surveillance, can be projected into any domain at any moment and can be stripped of any legal obligation pretty much equally freely.
This is a pessimal result.

We are the product. We're what Facebook sells to advertisers in order to bring in their business. Facebook needs to offer just enough privacy and control to keep most of us, but not so much as to ruin the value of the product.

So if it's not even close to true, instead of standing on the mountain going "THIS ISN'T TRUE! YOU ALL ARE IDIOTS!" whu don't you provide some concrete information about WHY it's not true?
I too am skeptical of the hysteria about the article, and I always look for collaborating information (more than everyone re-posting status updates "Facebook is at it again!")
To quote an old friend of mine. "Don't flame, inform!"
So? Where is your info?

Lots of 'agreements' have terms like that. In a lot of jurisdictions they carry no weight at all.

First you need to find out what jurisdiction. Facebook dosn't exactly go out of its way to tell you where they actually are. Their map implies they are in Western US, Eastern Canada, North West Europe (except Iceland), Russia, Japan, India, Egypt, Brazil, Colombia, Chilie, Nigeria, South Africa and South East Australia. Does selecting Canadian French mean that the jurisdiction is Canada; French French mean tha

"Like" is used in several other social-media websites, though. I could see that being more of a move to standardize on a term.

My question is have they removed the ability to change group names? It's pretty inevitable that someone will form a group "Kelly Clarkson is hot!", gets a few thousand users, and then changes it to "anal sex with men." Then, on each member's profile page...."RemoteControl69 likes anal sex with men."